Page:Fletcher--Where Highways Cross.djvu/179

 "Well?" said Hepworth.

"I'm forced to speak," said the stranger. "It's all chance that I should have come here this afternoon and met you. A day later, and the chance would have gone."

"What do you want to say?" Hepworth asked.

"You were to be married to-morrow to a young woman named Elisabeth Verrell?"

"Were to be? I am to be—what of it?"

"You cannot marry her."

Hepworth looked at him silently. He felt as if he were dreaming: there was something unreal about the whole thing. He seemed to be no longer himself but rather another man looking on at his own doings, hearing his own words.

"Cannot?" he said at last, after what appeared to him a long silence. "And why?"

"Because, sir, she is already married."

"That," said Hepworth, "I know. But her husband is dead—she is a widow."